End-to-end speech recognition with policy learning

ABSTRACT

The disclosed technology teaches a deep end-to-end speech recognition model, including using multi-objective learning criteria to train a deep end-to-end speech recognition model on training data comprising speech samples temporally labeled with ground truth transcriptions. The multi-objective learning criteria updates model parameters of the model over one thousand to millions of backpropagation iterations by combining, at each iteration, a maximum likelihood objective function that modifies the model parameters to maximize a probability of outputting a correct transcription and a policy gradient function that modifies the model parameters to maximize a positive reward defined based on a non-differentiable performance metric which penalizes incorrect transcriptions in accordance with their conformity to corresponding ground truth transcriptions; and upon convergence after a final backpropagation iteration, persisting the modified model parameters learned by using the multi-objective learning criteria with the model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition.

PRIORITY AND CROSS-REFERENCED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/878,113, filed Jan. 23, 2018, entitled “END-TO-END SPEECH RECOGNITION WITH POLICY LEARNING”, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/578,369, entitled “END-TO-END SPEECH RECOGNITION WITH POLICY LEARNING”, filed Oct. 27, 2017. The PRIORITY application is hereby incorporated by reference herein for all purposes.

This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/578,366, entitled “DEEP LEARNING-BASED NEURAL NETWORK, ARCHITECTURE, FRAMEWORKS AND ALGORITHMS”, filed Oct. 27, 2017. The related application is hereby incorporated by reference herein for all purposes.

FIELD OF THE TECHNOLOGY DISCLOSED

The technology disclosed relates generally to jointly training deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition models with maximum likelihood combined with policy gradient to improve the relative performance for the end-to-end models. The speech recognition models are utilized for speech-to-text, full transcription and automated speech recognition (ASR), which is also referred to as large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) and uses a set of words referred to as bi-grams, tri-grams, etc. as the basic unit.

BACKGROUND

The subject matter discussed in this section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in this section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in this section or associated with the subject matter provided as background should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in this section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed technology.

One limitation of deep end-to-end speech recognition models is that there exists a disparity between the objective function used during training and the evaluation criteria used during inference. In the training stage, a deep end-to-end speech recognition model optimizes a differentiable maximum likelihood objective function (MLOF) such as connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, the recognition accuracy during inference is evaluated based on discrete and non-differentiable performance metrics such as word error rate (WER) and character error rate (CER), which calculate the minimum string edit distance between the ground truth transcription and the output transcription. Thus, due to this disparity, it remains unclear how well the model approximates real-world speech during inference.

As discussed above, the model uses maximum likelihood objective function (MLOF) to maximize the likelihood of training data, as opposed to optimizing error rate evaluation metrics which actually quantify recognition quality. MLOF maximizes the log probability of getting the whole transcription completely correct. The relative probabilities of incorrect transcriptions are therefore ignored, which implies that they are all equally bad. In most cases however, transcription performance is assessed in a more nuanced way. MLOF makes no distinction between incorrect transcriptions and equally penalizes them through normalization regardless of how near or far they are from the ground truth transcriptions.

In contrast, performance metrics such as WER and CER typically aim to reflect the plausibility of incorrect transcriptions. For example, WER penalizes less for an output transcription that has less edit distance to the ground truth transcription. This makes it possible for incorrect transcriptions with low WER to be preferred over those with high WER.

Optimizing model parameters with the appropriate training function is crucial to achieving good model performance. An opportunity arises to directly improve a deep end-to-end speech recognition model with respect to the evaluation metrics such as WER and CER, thereby improving relative performance for an end-to-end speech recognition model as compared to the same model learned through maximum likelihood. The disclosed systems and methods make it possible to achieve a new state-of-the art WER for the deep end-to-end speech recognition model.

SUMMARY

A simplified summary is provided herein to help enable a basic or general understanding of various aspects of exemplary, non-limiting implementations that follow in the more detailed description and the accompanying drawings. This summary is not intended, however, as an extensive or exhaustive overview. Instead, the sole purpose of the summary is to present some concepts related to some exemplary non-limiting implementations in a simplified form as a prelude to the more detailed description of the various implementations that follow.

The disclosed technology teaches a computer-implemented method of training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model, including using multi-objective learning criteria to train a deep end-to-end speech recognition model on training data comprising speech samples temporally labeled with ground truth transcriptions. The multi-objective learning criteria updates model parameters of the model over one thousand to millions of backpropagation iterations by combining, at each iteration. The disclosed method also includes a maximum likelihood objective function that modifies the model parameters to maximize a probability of outputting a correct transcription and a policy gradient function that modifies the model parameters to maximize a positive reward defined based on a non-differentiable performance metric which penalizes incorrect transcriptions in accordance with their conformity to corresponding ground truth transcriptions; and upon convergence after a final backpropagation iteration, persisting the modified model parameters learned by using the multi-objective learning criteria with the model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition.

Other aspects and advantages of the technology disclosed can be seen on review of the drawings, the detailed description and the claims, which follow.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

In the drawings, like reference characters generally refer to like parts throughout the different views. Also, the drawings are not necessarily to scale, with an emphasis instead generally being placed upon illustrating the principles of the technology disclosed. In the following description, various implementations of the technology disclosed are described with reference to the following drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary system for jointly training, with maximum likelihood and policy gradient, a deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition model according to one implementation of the technology disclosed.

FIG. 2 shows a block diagram for the preprocessor for jointly training the deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition model of FIG. 1.

FIG. 3A shows a detailed block diagram of the trainer for the deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition model of FIG. 1.

FIG. 3B shows some example modules of the policy gradient function of FIG. 1. These include a sampling module, a reward determiner module, a gradient estimator module, and a sample update module.

FIG. 4 shows an example whole transcription sampled by the sampling module of FIG. 3B.

FIG. 5 shows a block diagram for the model for normalized input speech data and the deep end-to-end speech recognition, and for training, in accordance with one or more implementations of the technology disclosed.

FIG. 6 shows the equations for operations performed by the depth-wise separable convolution with D input channels and N output channels for the deep end-to-end speech recognition model, in accordance with one or more implementations of the technology disclosed.

FIG. 7A shows a table of the word error rate results from the WSJ dataset.

FIG. 7B shows performance of the model when utilizing the LibriSpeech dataset.

FIG. 7C shows comparative results with other end-to-end methods on WSJ eval92 dataset.

FIG. 7D shows comparative results with other end-to-end methods on Libri Speech dataset.

FIG. 8 is a block diagram of an exemplary system for jointly training, with maximum likelihood and policy gradient, a deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition model, in accordance with one or more implementations of the technology disclosed.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

The following detailed description is made with reference to the figures. Sample implementations are described to illustrate the technology disclosed, not to limit its scope, which is defined by the claims. Those of ordinary skill in the art will recognize a variety of equivalent variations on the description that follows.

Deep neural networks are the basis for some of the most accurate speech recognition systems in research and production. Neural network based acoustic models are commonly used as sub-components in a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and hidden Markov model (HMM) based hybrid system. Alignment is necessary to train the acoustic model and a two-stage alignment and frame prediction training process is required for a typical hybrid system. A drawback of such a process is the disconnect that exists between the acoustic model training and the final objective. The end-to-end neural network based speech models bypass this two-stage training process by directly maximizing the likelihood of the data.

While the end-to-end models are commonly trained with maximum likelihood, the final performance metric for a speech recognition system is typically word error rate (WER) or character error rate (CER), resulting in a mismatch between the objective that is optimized and the evaluation metric. In an ideal setting the model should be trained to optimize the final metric. However, since the metrics are commonly discrete and non-differentiable, it is very difficult to optimize in practice.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to be effective on improving performance for problems that have a non-differentiable metric, through policy gradient. In particular, REINFORCE algorithm enables one to estimate the gradient of the expected reward by sampling from the model. REINFORCE algorithm makes weight adjustments in a direction that lies along the gradient of expected reinforcement without explicitly computing gradient estimates or storing information from which such estimates could be computed, and thus can be naturally integrated with backpropagation. In particular, with policy learning one can directly optimize on the otherwise non-differentiable performance metric.

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is a widely used method for maximum likelihood learning in end-to-end speech recognition models. However, there is usually a disparity between the negative maximum likelihood and the performance metric used in speech recognition—that is, the character error rate (CER) or word error rate (WER), resulting in mismatch between objective function and metric during training.

The disclosed technology reduces the mismatch between the training and inference conditions of deep end-to-end speech recognition models by training them on multi-objective learning criteria; that is, jointly training with maximum likelihood and policy gradient. The multi-objective learning criteria applies, in combination, the maximum likelihood objective function (MLOF) as connectionist temporal classification (CTC), and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based policy gradient function that optimizes a performance metric, such as CER or WER, defined over output transcriptions. The multi-objective learning criteria utilized in joint training improves relative performance for the disclosed end-to-end model, increasing computational efficiency and improving speech recognition accuracy.

The effectiveness of utilizing joint training of end-to-end models with self-critical policy learning and maximum likelihood is compared with published methods for end-to-end trainable, deep speech recognition models. The disclosed joint training of the end-to-end deep speech recognition models with self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning and maximum likelihood improves performance significantly. SCST is also efficient during training, as only one sampling process and two metric calculations are necessary.

The combination of joint training with policy learning and maximum likelihood gives a relative performance improvement on both Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and LibriSpeech datasets of 4% to 13% for the end-to-end model as compared to the same model learned through maximum likelihood. A system for joint training of end-to-end models with self-critical policy learning and maximum likelihood is described next.

FIG. 1 shows architecture 100 for disclosed joint training of end-to-end models with self-critical sequence training policy learning and maximum likelihood for deep neural network based, end-to-end speech recognition models. Architecture 100 includes machine learning system 122 with deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 that includes between one million and five million parameters and is described relative to FIG. 7 infra. Machine learning system 122 also includes trainer 152 with multi-objective learning criteria 162 which includes maximum likelihood objective function (MLOF) 172 and policy gradient function 182. Trainer 152 is described in detail relative to FIG. 2.

Continuing the description of FIG. 1, architecture 100 also includes training data store 168 for training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 and inference data store 128 for testing a deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 that has been trained. Training data store 168 and inference data store 128 include speech samples temporally labelled with text transcriptions. In one implementation the samples include the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dataset and the Libri Speech dataset—a large, 1000 hour, corpus of English read speech derived from audiobooks in the LibriVox project, sampled at 16 kHz. The accents are various and not marked, but the majority are US English. In another use case, a different set of samples could be utilized as audio speech and stored in inference data store 174. In one implementation, training data store 168 and inference data store 128 also store sample speech variations on original speech samples temporally labelled with text transcriptions, including modifying a particular original speech sample to independently vary tempo and pitch of the original speech sample while retaining the temporally labelled text transcription of the original speech sample, thereby producing multiple sample speech variations having multiple degrees of variation from the original speech sample and having the temporally labelled text transcription of the original speech sample. “A Deep Reinforced Model for Abstractive Summarization”, which is incorporated by reference, describes training with the sample speech variations in detail.

Architecture 100 also includes preprocessor 148 which computes a spectrogram for each of the input speech sample waves. The spectrograms capture the frequencies that make up the sound—a representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound and how they change over time. One implementation utilizes sound exchange utility (SoX) to convert between formats of computer audio files and to apply various effects to these sound files. In another implementation a different audio manipulation tool can be utilized.

Further continuing the description of FIG. 1, architecture 100 also includes network 145 that interconnects the elements of architecture 100: machine learning system 122, inference data store 128, training data store 168 and preprocessor 148 in communication with each other. The actual communication path can be point-to-point over public and/or private networks. Some items, such as data from data sources, might be delivered indirectly, e.g. via an application store (not shown). The communications can occur over a variety of networks, e.g. private networks, VPN, MPLS circuit, or Internet, and can use appropriate APIs and data interchange formats, e.g. REST, JSON, XML, SOAP and/or JMS. The communications can be encrypted. The communication is generally over a network such as the LAN (local area network), WAN (wide area network), telephone network (Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), Session initiation Protocol (SIP), wireless network, point-to-point network, star network, token ring network, hub network, Internet, inclusive of the mobile Internet, via protocols such as EDGE, 3G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi and WiMAX. Additionally, a variety of authorization and authentication techniques, such as username/password, OAuth, Kerberos, Secure ID, digital certificates and more, can be used to secure the communications.

FIG. 1 shows an architectural level schematic of a system in accordance with an implementation. Because FIG. 1 is an architectural diagram, certain details are intentionally omitted to improve the clarity of the description.

Moreover, the technology disclosed can be implemented using two or more separate and distinct computer-implemented systems that cooperate and communicate with one another. The technology disclosed can be implemented in numerous ways, including as a process, a method, an apparatus, a system, a device, a computer readable medium such as a computer readable storage medium that stores computer readable instructions or computer program code, or as a computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein.

In some implementations, the elements or components of architecture 100 can be engines of varying types including workstations, servers, computing clusters, blade servers, server farms, or any other data processing systems or computing devices. The elements or components can be communicably coupled to the databases via a different network connection.

While architecture 100 is described herein with reference to particular blocks, it is to be understood that the blocks are defined for convenience of description and are not intended to require a particular physical arrangement of component parts. Further, the blocks need not correspond to physically distinct components. To the extent that physically distinct, components are used, connections between components (e.g., for data communication) can be wired and/or wireless as desired. The different elements or components can be combined into single software modules and multiple software modules can run on the same hardware.

FIG. 2 shows a block diagram for preprocessor 148 which includes spectrogram generator 225 which takes as input, sampled speech audio wave 252 and computes, for each speech input, a spectrogram with a sliding 20 ms window and 10 ms step size. In another example, the sliding window and steps sizes can be different. Audio spectrogram 258 shows the audio spectrogram graph for example input speech audio wave 252 that represents the transcription, “A tanker is a ship designed to carry large volumes of oil or other liquid cargo.” This shows the frequencies that make up the speech sample—a representation of the spectrum of frequencies of sound and how they change over time, from left to right. In the example audio spectrogram 258, the x axis represents time in ms, the y axis illustrates frequency in Hertz (Hz) and the colors shown on the right side show power per frequency in decibels per Hertz (dB/Hz).

Continuing with FIG. 2, preprocessor 148 also includes normalizer 235 that normalizes each spectrogram to have zero mean and unit variance, and in addition, normalizes each feature to have zero mean and unit variance based on the training set statistics. Normalization changes only the numerical values inside the spectrogram. Normalizer 235 stores the results in normalized input speech data 255.

FIG. 3A illustrates a block diagram for trainer 152 that shows functional blocks for disclosed multi-objective learning criteria 162. Recurrent neural network (RNN) 352 is a neural network that has a memory that influences future predictions. Normalized input speech data 255 with input spectrogram 362 is input to RNN 352 which outputs T softmax vectors for k different paths, as a sequence of softmax probabilities 354. Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) maximum likelihood objective function (MLOF) 172 takes into account ground truth 386 and calculates error and gradients 348 which are fed back to RNN 352.

For the connectionist temporal classification (CTC), consider an entire neural network to be simply a function that takes in some input sequence of length T and outputs some output sequence y also of length T. As long as one has an objective function on the output sequence y, they can train their network to produce the desired output. The key idea behind CTC is that instead of somehow generating the label as output from the neural network, one instead generates a probability distribution at every time step and can then decode this probability distribution into a maximum likelihood label, and can train the network by creating an objective function that coerces the maximum likelihood decoding for a given input sequence to correspond to the desired label.

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) 172 utilizes an objective function that allows RNN 352 to be trained for sequence transcription tasks without requiring any prior alignment between the input and target sequences. The output layer contains a single unit for each of the transcription labels, such as characters or phonemes plus an extra unit referred to as the “blank” which corresponds to a null emission. Given a length T input sequence X the output vectors y_(t) are normalized with the softmax function, then interpreted as the probability of emitting the label or blank with index k at time t:

${\Pr\left( {k,\left. t \middle| x \right.} \right)} = \frac{\exp\left( y_{t}^{k} \right)}{\sum\limits_{k^{\prime}}^{\;}{\exp\left( y_{t}^{k^{\prime}} \right)}}$ where y_(t) ^(k) is an element k of y_(t). A CTC alignment a is a length T sequence of blank and label indices. The probability Pr(a|x) of a is the product of the emission probabilities at every time-step:

${\Pr\left( a \middle| x \right)} = {\prod\limits_{t = 1}^{T}{{\Pr\left( {a_{t},\left. t \middle| x \right.} \right)}.}}$

For a given transcription sequence, that are as many possible alignments as there are different ways of separating the labels with blanks. For example, using “-” to denote blanks, the alignments (a, . . . ,b,c . . . , . . . ) and ( . . . , . . . ,a, . . . , b,c) both correspond to the transcription (a,b,c).

When the same label appears on successive time-steps in an alignment, the repeats are removed. Therefore, (a, b,b,b,c,c) and (a, −,b−,c,c) also correspond to (a,b,c). Denoting by β an operator that removes first the repeated labels, then the blanks from alignments, and observing that the total probability of an output transcription y is equal to the sum of the probabilities of the alignments corresponding to it.

${\Pr\left( y \middle| x \right)} = {\sum\limits_{\alpha \in {\beta - {1{(y)}}}}^{\;}{\Pr\left( a \middle| x \right)}}$ This “integrating out” over possible alignments is what allows the network to be trained with unsegmented data. The intuition is that, because we don't know where the labels within a particular transcription will occur, we sum over all the places where they could occur. Pr(y|x) can be efficiently evaluated and differentiated using a dynamic programming algorithm. Give the target transcription y*, the network can then be trained to minimize the CTC objective function: CTC(x)=−log Pr(y*|x)

The log likelihood reflects the log probability of getting the whole transcription completely correct. What it ignores are the probabilities of the incorrect transcriptions. In other words, all incorrect transcriptions are equally bad, which is clearly not the case. Furthermore, the performance metrics typically aim to reflect the plausibility of incorrect predictions. For example, WER penalizes less for a transcription that has less edit distance to the ground truth label. This results in a disparity between the optimization objective of the model and the (commonly discrete) evaluation criteria. This mismatch is mainly attributed to the inability to directly optimize the criteria.

One way to remedy this mismatch is to view the described problem in the policy learning framework of reinforcement learning, which is implemented by the policy gradient function 182. In this framework, one can view the deep speech recognition model (RNN 352) as an agent and the training samples (speech data 255) as the environment. The parameters of the model θ define a policy Prθ(y|x). The model interacts with the environment by following this policy. The agent then performs an action based on its current state, in which case the action is the generated transcriptions and the state is the model's hidden representations of its state (h₁, h₂, . . . , h_(t)).

In implementations, the policy gradient function 182 comprises a sampling module 125, which during training, samples a word or character from each time step prediction of the RNN 352, and concatenates the sampled values to produce a whole transcription. In one implementation, the sampling is random. In other implementations, the sampling is pseudo-random and follows a predetermined range-based selection scheme.

FIG. 4 shows an example whole transcription sampled by e sampling module 125 from softmax probabilities generated by the RNN 352 after processing a speech sample annotated with a “HALO” transcription. The illustrated example would use CER as the evaluation metric. Another example could include words instead of characters, and calculate WER. In FIG. 4, the x axis shows the letters predicted for each 20 ms window, and the y axis lists the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and blank 472 and space 482. The bright red entries correspond to letters sampled by the sampling module 125. The sampled whole transcription is “HHHEE_LL_LLLOOO”. In some implementations, a collapsing module (not show) enforces CTC collapsing rules and removes repeated letters and blanks to produce a final whole transcription “HELLO”.

Upon generating the whole transcription “HELLO”, a reward determiner module 135 observes a reward that is defined from the evaluation metric calculated on the current sample, such as “1-WER” or “1-CER” for the current transcription. In the illustrated example, the reward can be defined as the CER between the sampled transcription “HELLO” and the ground truth label “HALO”. The goal of training can be to obtain a policy that minimizes the negative expected reward. In other implementations, the goal of training can be to maximize the positive expected reward. The detailed equations are enumerated in the document titled “Improving End-To-End Speech Recognition with Policy Learning” which is included in U. S. Provisional Application No. 62/578,369, entitled “End-To-End Speech Recognition with Policy Learning” which is incorporated by reference herein.

The gradient for minimizing the negative expected reward for a current sampled transcription can be obtained a gradient estimator module 145 using a REINFORCE algorithm to make weight adjustments in a direction that lies along the gradient of expected reinforcement without explicitly computing gradient estimates or storing information from which such estimates could be computed. In one example, the gradient can be obtained through REINFORCE as: Δ_(θ) L _(P)(θ)≈−r(y ^(s))Δ_(θ)log P _(θ)(y ^(s) |x)  policy gradient 732 which shows the Monte Carlo approximation of the gradient with a single example, which is a common practice when training the model with a stochastic gradient descent algorithm like ADAM. The policy gradient obtained from minimizing the negative expected reward is often of high variance, and the training can get unstable.

A sample update module 155 uses the chain rule (backpropagation) to update the softmax activations/probabilities of the sampled values and model parameters of RNN 352 based on the gradients estimated by the gradient estimator module 145 from the expected rewards on sample-by-sample basis. Accordingly, samples from the RNN 352 that return higher reward are “pushed UP”, or increased in probability, while samples which result in lower reward are suppressed.

Learning can be slow and unstable at the beginning of training with policy gradient methods, including SCST, because it is unlikely for the deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 to have reasonable output at the beginning stage, which leads to implausible samples with low rewards. Learning will be slow in the case of a small learning rate and unstable otherwise. In SCST, the policy gradient is computed with a baseline, which is the greedy output from the model, which is calculated using: Δ_(θ) L _(P)(θ)≈−r(y ^(s))Δ_(θ)log P _(θ)(y ^(s) |x)  policy gradient 742

The disclosed method remedies the problem of slow and unstable learning by incorporating maximum likelihood objective implemented by the CTC MLOF 172 along with policy gradient implemented by the policy gradient function 182, since in maximum likelihood the probability is evaluated on the ground truth targets, and hence will get large gradients when the model output is incorrect. This leads to the following multi-objective learning criteria 162 for training the end-to-end speech model: L(θ)=−log P _(θ)(y|x)+λL _(SCST)(θ) where L _(SCST)(θ)=−{g(y ^(s) ,y)−g(ŷ,y)}log P _(θ)(y ^(s) |x) where g (•,•) represents the reward function and λ∈(0, +∞) is the coefficient that controls the contribution from SCST. In the example case, g(•, y)=1−max(1, WER(•, y)). Training with the defined objective is efficient, since both sampling and greedy decoding are cheap. The reward calculation need only be computed twice per batch of examples, adding only a minimal overhead. SCST is a form of REINFORCE algorithm that, rather than estimating a baseline to normalize the rewards and reduce variance, utilizes the output of its own test-time inference algorithm to normalize the rewards it experiences.

Each letter predicted by the multi-objective learning criteria 162 affects the likelihood of the next letter it will predict too. In a simple example, if an audio file recording has said “HEL” so far, it is very likely that it will say “LO” next to finish out the word “Hello”. It is much less likely that it will say something unpronounceable next like “XYZ”. So having that memory of previous predictions helps the neural network make more accurate predictions going forward.

In implementations, trainer 152 trains the RNN 352 using the multi-objective learning criteria 162 over thousand to millions of backpropagation iterations. The training can be implemented using a stochastic gradient descent/ascent approach such as ADAM.

The disclosed technology includes training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model, on thousands to millions of original speech samples and the sample speech variations on the original speech samples, that outputs recognized text transcriptions corresponding to speech detected in the speech samples. The disclosed model has over five million parameters, making regularization important for the speech recognition model to generalize well. The model architecture is described next.

FIG. 5 shows the model architecture for deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 whose full end-to-end model structure is illustrated. Different colored blocks represent different layers, as shown in the legend on the right side of block diagram of the model. A stack of convolution layers in the front-end are included for feature extraction, with time and frequency convolution, to model both the temporal transitions and spectral variations in speech utterances. A stack of recurrent layers are included for sequence modeling. First, deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 uses depth-wise separable convolution for all the convolution layers. The depth-wise separable convolution is implemented by first convolving 594 over the input channel-wise, and then convolving with 1×1 filters with the desired number of channels. Stride size only influences the channel-wise convolution; the following 1×1 convolutions always have stride (subsample) size of one.

Continuing the description of FIG. 5, deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 is composed of one standard convolution layer 594 that has larger filter size, followed by five residual convolution blocks 564. Convolutional features are then given as input to a 4-layer bidirectional recurrent neural network 554 with gated recurrent unit (GRU) layers. Finally, two fully-connected (abbreviated FC) layers 544, 514 take the last hidden RNN layer as input and output the final per-character prediction 506. Batch normalization 584, 534 is applied to all layers to facilitate training.

FIG. 6 shows the equations for operations performed by the depth-wise separable convolution with D input channels and N output channels, for an input sample X∈

^(W×H×D) with channel-wise convolution c∈

^(W×H×D) and 1×1 convolution-weights w∈

^(D×N), where s 645 is the channel-wise convolution result, o 655 is the result from depth-wise separable convolution, d∈{1, . . . , D} and n∈{1, 2, . . . , N}. A residual connection is also added between the input and the layer output for the depth-wise separable convolution to facilitate training.

Continuing the description of the model, the size of the convolution layer is denoted by tuple (C, F, I, SF, ST), where C, F, T, SF, and ST denote number of channels, filter size in frequency dimension, filter size in time dimension, stride in frequency dimension and stride in time dimension respectively. The model has one convolutional layer with size (32,41,11,2,2), and five residual convolution blocks of size (32,7,3,1,1), (32,5,3,1,1), (32,3,3,1,1), (64,3,3,2,1), (64,3,3,1,1) respectively. Following the convolutional layers, the model has 4 layers of bidirectional GRU RNNs with 1024 hidden units per direction per layer. Finally the model has one fully connected hidden layer of size 1024 followed by the output layer. The convolutional and fully connected layers are initialized uniformly. The recurrent layer weights are initialized with a uniform distribution U(−1/32; 1/32).

Further continuing the description of the model, dropout prevents the coadaptation of hidden units by randomly zeroing out a subset of inputs for that layer during training. Deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 includes applying dropout to each input layer of the network. Triangles 596, 576, 556, 546 and 516 are indicators that dropout happens right before the layer to which the triangle points. The dropout probabilities are set as 0.1 for data, 0.2 for all convolution layers, and 0.3 for all recurrent and fully connected layers. In another implementation, the dropout probabilities can be set with different values.

The model is trained in an end-to-end fashion to minimize the mixed objective for training the end-to-end speech model described supra: using mini-batch stochastic gradient descent with batch size 64, learning rate 0.1, and with Nesterov momentum 0.95. The learning rate is reduced by half whenever the validation loss has plateaued, and the model is trained until the validation loss stops improving. The norm of the gradient is clipped to have a maximum value of 1.

FIG. 5 illustrates the input for the model as normalized input speech data 255 and final per-character prediction 506 output of deep end-to-end speech recognition model 132 is input to trainer 152. The input to the model is a spectrogram computed with a 20 ms window and 10 ms step size, as described relative to FIG. 2.

Experiments on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and LibriSpeech datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the disclosed multi-objective policy learning. The first set of experiments was carried out on the WSJ corpus, using the standard si284 set for training, dev93 for validation and eval92 for test evaluation. Using the provided language model, the results are reported in the 20K closed vocabulary setting with beam search. The beam width is set to 100. Results of experiments performed on both datasets with various settings are described next.

The disclosed model performance is competitive with other end-to-end speech models on both the WSJ and the LibriSpeech datasets. In general, a machine learning dataset has a training set and a separate testing set. One uses only the data in the training set to train the model and evaluates on the testing set, to ensure a fair comparison metric for people working on the same problem. The more training data one has, the more likely it becomes that one will have a better-performing model at test time.

FIG. 7A shows a table of the word error rate results from the WSJ dataset. Baseline 722 denotes the model trained with CTC only. Policy gradient methods 732, 742 improve results over baseline. In particular, the use of SCST results in 13.8% relative performance improvement on the eval92 set over the baseline: (6.42% 726−5.53% 746)/6.42% 726=13.8%.

FIG. 7B shows performance of the model when utilizing the LibriSpeech dataset. Our model achieves 5.42% 764 and 14.70% 784 WER on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other sets. Policy 754 denotes results when the model is trained with the disclosed multi-objective objective that incorporates maximum likelihood objective along with policy gradient, described in detail supra. Using the LibriSpeech dataset, the model is trained using all 960 hours of training data. Both dev-clean 762 and dev-other 772 are used for validation. The provided 4-gram language model is used for final beam search decoding. The beam width is also set to 100 for decoding. Overall, a relative approximate 4% performance improvement over the baseline is observed.

FIG. 7C shows comparative results with other end-to-end methods on WSJ eval92 dataset. Our model achieves 5.53% WER 768 on Wall Street Journal dataset. Ours (LibriSpeech) 766 denotes the disclosed model trained using LibriSpeech dataset only, and tested on WSJ. FIG. 7D shows comparative results with other end-to-end methods on Libri Speech dataset. Amodei et al. 756 used more training data including external data that is outside the training data of the WSJ dataset. WSJ has 80 hours of training data Amodei et al. target a usable system that is not focused on setting up a benchmark result, so they used 11,940 hours of training data. Therefore, their result is not a fair comparison to all others. However, since their work is an influential work for end-to-end speech recognition, people also tend to compare with their results, so their results are included in FIG. 7C and FIG. 7D. Note that their external data includes data that is not publicly available, so the disclosed system is not trained on the same dataset as theirs and compared. The disclosed model achieved competitive performance with other methods on both datasets, as illustrated in FIG. 7C and FIG. 7D. In particular, with the help of policy learning, the disclosed method achieved similar results as Amodei et al, on LibriSpeech without using additional data. To see whether the disclosed model generalizes, the disclosed LibriSpeech model was also tested on the WSJ dataset. The result is significantly better than the model trained on WSJ data which suggests that the end-to-end models benefit more when more data is available.

The disclosed methods close the gap between the maximum likelihood training objective and the final performance metric for end-to-end speech models. Test results show that this gap can be reduced by using the policy gradient method along with the negative log-likelihood. In particular, we apply a multi-objective training with SCST to reduce the expected negative reward that is defined by using the final metric. The joint training is computationally efficient. We show that the joint training is effective even with single sample approximation, which improves the relative performance on WSJ and Libri Speech by 13% and 4% over the baseline.

Computer System

FIG. 8 is a simplified block diagram of a computer system 800 that can be used to implement the machine learning system 122 of FIG. 1 for regularizing a deep end-to-end speech recognition model to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. Computer system 800 includes at least one central processing unit (CPU) 872 that communicates with a number of peripheral devices via bus subsystem 855. These peripheral devices can include a storage subsystem 810 including, for example, memory devices and a file storage subsystem 836, user interface input devices 838, user interface output devices 876, and a network interface subsystem 874. The input and output devices allow user interaction with computer system 800. Network interface subsystem 874 provides an interface to outside networks, including an interface to corresponding interface devices in other computer systems.

In one implementation, the machine learning system 122 of FIG. 1 is communicably linked to the storage subsystem 810 and the user interface input devices 838.

User interface input devices 838 can include a keyboard; pointing devices such as a mouse, trackball, touchpad, or graphics tablet; a scanner; a touch screen incorporated into the display; audio input devices such as voice recognition systems and microphones; and other types of input devices. In general, use of the term “input device” is intended to include all possible types of devices and ways to input information into computer system 800.

User interface output devices 876 can include a display subsystem, a printer, a fax machine, or non-visual displays such as audio output devices. The display subsystem can include an LEI) display, a cathode ray tube (CRT), a flat-panel device such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), a projection device, or some other mechanism for creating a visible image. The display subsystem can also provide a non-visual display such as audio output devices. In general, use of the term “output device” is intended to include all possible types of devices and ways to output information from computer system 800 to the user or to another machine or computer system.

Storage subsystem 810 stores programming and data constructs that provide the functionality of some or all of the modules and methods described herein. These software modules are generally executed by deep learning processors 878.

Deep learning processors 878 can be graphics processing units (CPUs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Deep learning processors 878 can be hosted by a deep learning cloud platform such as Google Cloud Platform™, Xilinx™, and Cirrascale™. Examples of deep learning processors 878 include Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)™, rackmount solutions like GX4 Rackmount Series™, GX8 Rackmount Series™, NVIDIA:DGX-1™, Microsoft' Stratix V FPGA™, Graphcore's intelligent Processor Unit (IPU)™, Qualcomm's Zeroth Platform™ with Snapdragon Processors™, NVIDIA's Voltam™, NVIDIA's DRIVE PX™, NVIDIA's JETSON TX1/TX2 MODULE™, Intel's Nirvana™, Movidius VPU™, Fujitsu DPI™, ARM's DynamicIQ™, IBM TrueNorth™, and others.

Memory subsystem 822 used in the storage subsystem 810 can include a number of memories including a main random access memory (RAM) 832 for storage of instructions and data during program execution and a read only memory (ROM) 834 in which fixed instructions are stored. A file storage subsystem 836 can provide persistent storage for program and data files, and can include a hard disk drive, a floppy disk drive along with associated removable media, a CD-ROM drive, an optical drive, or removable media cartridges. The modules implementing the functionality of certain implementations can be stored by file storage subsystem 836 in the storage subsystem 810, or in other machines accessible by the processor.

Bus subsystem 855 provides a mechanism for letting the various components and subsystems of computer system 800 communicate with each other as intended. Although bus subsystem 855 is shown schematically as a single bus, alternative implementations of the bus subsystem can use multiple busses.

Computer system 800 itself can be of varying types including a personal computer, a portable computer, a workstation, a computer terminal, a network computer, a television, a mainframe, a server farm, a widely-distributed set of loosely networked computers, or any other data processing system or user device. Due to the ever-changing nature of computers and networks, the description of computer system 800 depicted in FIG. 8 is intended only as a specific example for purposes of illustrating the preferred embodiments of the present invention. Many other configurations of computer system 800 are possible having more or less components than the computer system depicted in FIG. 8.

The preceding description is presented to enable the making and use of the technology disclosed. Various modifications to the disclosed implementations will be apparent, and the general principles defined herein may be applied to other implementations and applications without departing from the spirit and scope of the technology disclosed. Thus, the technology disclosed is not intended to be limited to the implementations shown, but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and features disclosed herein. The scope of the technology disclosed is defined by the appended claims.

Some Particular Implementations

Some particular implementations and features are described in the following discussion.

In one implementation, a disclosed computer-implemented method of training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model includes using a multi-objective learning criteria to train a deep end-to-end speech recognition model on training data comprising speech samples temporally labeled with ground truth transcriptions, wherein the multi-objective learning criteria updates model parameters of the model over one thousand to millions of backpropagation iterations by combining, at each iteration, a maximum likelihood objective function that modifies the model parameters to maximize a probability of outputting a correct transcription and a policy gradient function that modified the model parameters to maximize a positive reward defined based on a non-differentiable performance metric which penalizes incorrect transcriptions in accordance with their conformity to corresponding ground truth transcriptions; and upon convergence after a final backpropagation iteration, persisting the modified model parameters learned by using the multi-objective learning criteria with the model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition. Convergence is a term of art used in deep learning to indicate that the model has been fully trained and the weight coefficients of the network have “converged” or the error has descended to a local minima.

This method and other implementations of the technology disclosed can include one or more of the following features and/or features described in connection with additional methods disclosed. In the interest of conciseness, the combinations of features disclosed in this application are not individually enumerated and are not repeated with each base set of features.

For one implementation of the disclosed method, for each timestep, the model produces a normalized distribution of softmax probabilities over a set of transcription labels, including a blank label. The disclosed maximum likelihood objective function is a connectionist temporal classification (abbreviated CTC) objective function that maximizes the probability of outputting the correct transcription by combining individual probabilities of a plurality of candidate output transcriptions to produce an output transcription, wherein an individual probability of a candidate output transcription is determined by selecting a most probable label for each timestep and multiplying softmax probabilities of each of the selected labels; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription. The disclosed policy gradient function determines the reward for an output transcription by independently sampling a transcription label for each timestep and concatenating the transcription labels sampled across the timesteps to produce the output transcription; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription based on the performance metric.

In one implementation of the disclosed method, the performance metric is word error rate (abbreviated WER). In other implementations, the performance metric is character error rate (abbreviated CER). In some implementations, the reward is determined based on a reward function that is defined as 1-WER. For the disclosed method, the policy gradient function minimizes a negative reward defined based on the performance metric.

In one implementation of the disclosed method, the policy gradient function is applied using self-critical sequence training (abbreviated SCST).

In some implementations of the disclosed method, the relative reliance on the maximum likelihood objective function and the policy gradient function shifts during training, with greater emphasis on the maximum likelihood objective function early in training than late in training.

The disclosed model has between one million and five million parameters.

Some implementations of the disclosed method further include regularizing the model by applying variant dropout to inputs of convolutional and recurrent layers of the model. The recurrent layers of this system can include LSTM layers, GRU layers, residual blocks, and/or batch normalization layers.

One implementation of a disclosed deep end-to-end deep speech recognition system includes a an input port that receives digital audio samples of a signal comprising speech; a deep end-to-end speech recognition processor comprising hardware and a stack of layers running on the hardware including convolution layers and recurrent layers, coupled to the input port and configurable to process the digital audio samples, recognize speech from the audio samples, and output transcriptions corresponding to recognized speech. For the disclosed speech recognition system, the deep end-to-end speech recognition processor includes parameters trained using a multi-objective learning criteria on training data comprising speech samples temporally labeled with ground truth transcriptions; and wherein the multi-objective learning criteria update the processor parameters over one thousand to millions of backpropagation iterations by combining, at each iteration, a maximum likelihood objective function that modified the processor parameters to maximize a probability of outputting a correct transcription and a policy gradient function that modified the processor parameters to maximize a positive reward defined based on a non-differentiable performance metric which penalizes incorrect transcriptions in accordance with their conformity to corresponding ground truth transcriptions.

In another implementation, a disclosed system includes one or more processors coupled to memory, the memory impressed with computer instructions, the instructions, when executed on the processors, implement actions of the disclosed method described supra.

This system implementation and other systems disclosed optionally include one or more of the features described in connection with methods disclosed. In the interest of conciseness, alternative combinations of system features are not individually enumerated. Features applicable to systems, methods, and articles of manufacture are not repeated for each statutory class set of base features. The reader will understand how features identified in this section can readily be combined with base features in other statutory classes.

In yet another implementation a disclosed tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium impressed with computer program instructions to train a deep end-to-end speech recognition model. The instructions, when executed on a processor, implement the disclosed method described supra.

The technology disclosed can be practiced as a system, method, or article of manufacture. One or more features of an implementation can be combined with the base implementation. Implementations that are not mutually exclusive are taught to be combinable. One or more features of an implementation can be combined with other implementations. This disclosure periodically reminds the user of these options. Omission from some implementations of recitations that repeat these options should not be taken as limiting the combinations taught in the preceding sections—these recitations are hereby incorporated forward by reference into each of the following implementations.

The terms and expressions employed herein are used as terms and expressions of description and not of limitation, and there is no intention, in the use of such terms and expressions, of excluding any equivalents of the features shown and described or portions thereof. In addition, having described certain implementations of the technology disclosed, it will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art that other implementations incorporating the concepts disclosed herein can be used without departing from the spirit and scope of the technology disclosed. Accordingly, the described implementations are to be considered in all respects as only illustrative and not restrictive.

While the technology disclosed is disclosed by reference to the preferred embodiments and examples detailed above, it is to be understood that these examples are intended in an illustrative rather than in a limiting sense. It is contemplated that modifications and combinations will readily occur to those skilled in the art, which modifications and combinations will be within the spirit of the innovation and the scope of the following claims. 

We claim as follows:
 1. A computer-implemented method of training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model, the method comprising: receiving training data comprising speech samples labeled with ground truth transcriptions; generating, via the deep end-to-end speech recognition model, a respective distribution of an output transcription corresponding to each speech sample from the training data; jointly training the deep end-to-end speech recognition model with the received training data to update parameters of the model, wherein the joint training comprises: computing a maximum likelihood objective function based on the respective distribution of the output transcription; computing a self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning objective function based on the output transcription, a sampled transcription and a ground truth transcription from the training data; updating the deep end-to-end speech recognition model based on a weighted sum of the maximum likelihood objective function and the SCST policy learning objective function; and persisting the modified model parameters learned by the joint training with the deep end-to-end speech recognition model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition.
 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function comprises a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) objective function.
 3. The method of claim 1, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription.
 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the model produces a normalized distribution of softmax probabilities over a set of transcription labels.
 5. The method of claim 4, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function maximizes a probability of the model outputting a correct transcription by: combining individual probabilities of a plurality of candidate output transcriptions to produce an output transcription, wherein an individual probability of a candidate output transcription is determined by selecting a most probable label for each of a plurality of timesteps and multiplying softmax probabilities of each of the selected labels; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription.
 6. The method of claim 4, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription by: independently sampling a transcription label for each of a plurality of timesteps and concatenating the transcription labels sampled across the timesteps to produce the output transcription; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription based on a performance metric.
 7. The method of claim 4, wherein the performance metric is word error rate (WER).
 8. The method of claim 4, wherein the performance metric is character error rate (CER).
 9. A deep end-to-end speech recognition system, comprising: an input port that receives digital audio samples of a signal comprising speech labeled with a ground truth transcription; and a deep end-to-end speech recognition processor comprising hardware and a stack of layers running on the hardware including convolution layers and recurrent layers, coupled to the input port and configurable to process the digital audio samples, recognize speech from the audio samples, and output transcriptions corresponding to recognized speech; wherein the deep end-to-end speech recognition processor includes parameters jointly trained on training data to update parameters of the deep end-to-end speech recognition model, wherein the joint training comprises: computing a maximum likelihood objective function based on the respective distribution of the output transcription; computing a self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning objective function based on the output transcription, a sampled transcription and a ground truth transcription from the training data; updating the deep end-to-end speech recognition model based on a weighted sum of the maximum likelihood objective function and the SCST policy learning objective function; and wherein the modified model parameters learned by the joint training are persisted with the model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition.
 10. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 9, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function comprises a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) objective function.
 11. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 9, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription.
 12. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 9, wherein the processor produces a normalized distribution of softmax probabilities over a set of transcription labels.
 13. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 12, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function maximizes the probability of the model outputting a correct transcription by: combining individual probabilities of a plurality of candidate output transcriptions to produce an output transcription, wherein an individual probability of a candidate output transcription is determined by selecting a most probable label for each of a plurality of timesteps and multiplying softmax probabilities of each of the selected labels; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription.
 14. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 12, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription by: independently sampling a transcription label for each of a plurality of timesteps and concatenating the transcription labels sampled across the timesteps to produce the output transcription; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription based on the performance metric.
 15. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 14, wherein the performance metric is word error rate (WER).
 16. The deep end-to-end speech recognition system of claim 14, wherein the performance metric is character error rate (CER).
 17. A tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium having stored thereon program instructions executable by a processor, the instructions, when executed on a processor, implement a method including: receiving training data comprising speech samples labeled with ground truth transcriptions; generating, via the deep end-to-end speech recognition model, a respective distribution of an output transcription corresponding to each speech sample from the training data; jointly training a deep end-to-end speech recognition model on training data comprising speech samples to update parameters of the model, wherein the joint training comprises: computing a maximum likelihood objective function based on the respective distribution of the output transcription; computing a self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning objective function based on the output transcription, a sampled transcription and a ground truth transcription from the training data; updating the deep end-to-end speech recognition model based on a weighted sum of the maximum likelihood objective function and the SCST policy learning objective function; and persisting the modified model parameters learned by the joint training with the deep end-to-end speech recognition model to be applied to further end-to-end speech recognition.
 18. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 17, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function comprises a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) objective function.
 19. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 17, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription.
 20. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 17, wherein the model produces a normalized distribution of softmax probabilities over a set of transcription labels.
 21. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the maximum likelihood objective function maximizes the probability of the model outputting a correct transcription by: combining individual probabilities of a plurality of candidate output transcriptions to produce an output transcription, wherein an individual probability of a candidate output transcription is determined by selecting a most probable label for each of a plurality of timesteps and multiplying softmax probabilities of each of the selected labels; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription.
 22. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the self-critical sequence training (SCST) policy learning determines a reward for an output transcription by: independently sampling a transcription label for each of a plurality of timesteps and concatenating the transcription labels sampled across the timesteps to produce the output transcription; and measuring differences between the output transcription and a ground truth transcription based on a performance metric.
 23. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 22, wherein the performance metric is word error rate (WER).
 24. The tangible non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 22, wherein the performance metric is character error rate (CER). 